ALL THE KING'S SONS

ANNALS OF ARCHEOLOGY about archeologist Kent R. Weeks & the discovery behind some t-shirt stands of an enormous, apparently looted tomb, KV5, in Egypt's Valley of the Kings apparently built for Ramesses II's 52 sons... On Feb. 2, 1995, archeologist Kent R. Weeks found himself inside a mountain...on his belly in the dust of a tomb. He was crawling toward a long-buried doorway that no one had entered for at least 3100 years... The tomb was of an entirely new type, never seen by archeologists before. "The architecture didn't fit any known pattern," Weeks told writer. "And it was so big. I just couldn't make sense of it." The largest pharonic tombs in the Valley contain 10 or 15 rooms at most. This one had at least 67--the total making it not only the biggest tomb in the Valley but possibly in all Egypt.... Howard Carter--the archeologist who discovered King Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, 200 feet further on--dug two feet in to the tomb, decided that KV5's entrance looked unimportant, and used it as a dumping ground for debris from his other excavations, thus burying it under 10 feet of stone and dirt. The location of the tomb's entrance was quickly forgotten. It took about 10 days of channeling through Carter's heaps of debris for Weeks and his men to find the ancient doorway of KV5, and it proved to be directly across the path from the tomb of Ramesses the Great...the media wondered whether the tomb would prove that Ramesses II was indeed the pharaoh referred to in Exodus. His reign lasted an unprecedented 67 years, from 1279 to 1213 B.C... Describes how tombs were traditionally designed... The Valley lies on the outskirt of the ancient city of Thebes... Describes the haphazard archeological practices in Egypt; KV5 will be one of the first tombs in the Valley of the Kings to be entirely excavated and documented according to proper archeological techniques... Describes Weeks's career. He is a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo... Describes his Theban Mapping Project, which is to include the topography of the Valley and the 3-dimensional placement of each tomb within the rock in a computerized format... Describes an apparently false floor in one of the chambers... Weeks has managed to dig out only 3 rooms completely and clear eight others partway--leaving more than 80 rooms entirely untouched. What treasures lie under 5 or 10 feet of debris in those rooms is anyone's guess. It will take from 6 to 10 more years to clear and stabilize the tomb, and then many more years to publish the findings from it. Weeks plans to tour the US, lecturing and raising more funds... Writer tells about being the first to enter a minor, rubble-filled room in the tomb...